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JP| Vol. IV. No. lf>5. July U, 1885. 

i 

iXTbomae Carlisle. 



BY THE AUTHOR OF 



OBITEK DICTA," 



IMPORTANT NOTICE. 

Since the days of Charles Lamb a more charming and 
brilliant collection of essays has perhaps not been given to the 
public than that presented in the little volume entitled * ' Obiter 
Dicta." The essay on " Carlyle" presented in this issue of 
The Elzevir Library will at once justify this estimate and 
whet the appetite of appreciative readers for a new feast with 
the Genius of Chelsea, a delightful opportuiiity for which is 
presented in the excellent, yet low-priced, edition of his works 
elsewhei-e announced. 

B'OOK-SELLERS all over the continent now sell my 
publicatioiLs — in many towns the leading Book-seller has 
exclusive local agency. 

CATALOGUES. Illustrated Catalogue of my publica- 
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IRemarhabie Pralee. 

The WORKS of RUSKIN. 

' ' Ruskin always fills his readers with delight. One goes 
back to these books with the pleasure felt ou theh* first peiiisal. They 
are a mine of riches." — The Presbyterian. Philadelphia, Pa. 

' ' Ruskin is so suggestive, so thought-inspiring, and instruct- 
ive a writer that the possession of his works, to read at leisure, or to 
refer to, would be an unfailing source of pleasure, profit, and intellect- 
ual uplifting to their owner." — The Index, Boston. 

' ' Mr. John B. Alden has outdone himself in the specimen 
volume i-ecently issued of his illustrated libi-ary edition of the works 
of John Ruskin." — Sunday School Times, Philadelphia, Pa. 

''Ruskin's titles are fanciful, but his writings are solid, 
painstaking, suggestive, and mstmctive. In the exposition of the 
ethics of art he has no equal among Enghsh writei-s, and he makes th»^ 
whole matter very clear to the ordinarily-instructed reader. Trutli 
and beauty in all visible fomis are his leading themes." — Morniny 
Neivs, Wilmington, Del. 

* '■ Mr. Alden is certainly a well-abused man, and it is not easy 
to see where he makes a profit, but he has unquestionably placed much 
good hterature within reach of pei-sons with Ihnited meai^." — The 
Week, Toronto Canada. 

" Ruskin lifts a veil and discloses to us new beauties, new 
wonders in Natui-e and Art. His style as a writer is always 
peculiar and always charming — and always highly his own; and 
very effective in presenting the thought or the shades of thought 
he would conve^^ His fine enthusiasm impai-ts itself to the reader." — 
The Times, Hartford, Ct. 

"It is certainly a superior specimen of book-making. The 
type, paper, and illustrations all combine to verify the statement of 
the publisher that the edition wiU be one worthy the great master of 
modem English eloquence. If the edition is completed in the same 
style, it wiU be an honor to the pubhsher and will serve the purpose of 
all who desire the works of the great art critic in appropriate hbraiy 
shape. The wiitings of Ruskin are eminently worthy of a more ap- 
propriate garb than that in which they have been previously presented 
to the American pubhc, and this edition bids fair to not only supply a 
special need, but to please admirers of the marvelously gifted wi'iter, 
whose pen touches only to adorn all subjects connected with art, hter- 
ature, and human progress. "—T/ie Universalist, Chicago, 111. 

•' These works present abundant food for thought, as all the 
world has acknowledged long ago. It is the first really complete 
American edition of Ruskin, and seems, fi-om this specimen volume, to 
liave been jirepared with extreme care. Ruskin's audience seems to 
be increasing, and this edition of his works is one which his admirers 
should welcome."— 2%e Democrat^ Davenport, Iowa. 



•:b ^' ^'^ 



OBITER DICTA. 



CARLYLE. 



The accomplishments of our race have of 
late become so varied, that it is often no easy 
task to assign him whom we would judge to 
his proper station among men ; and yet, until 
this has been done, the guns of our criticism 
cannot be accurately levelled, and as a conse- 
quence the greater part of our fire must remain 
futile. He, for example, who would essay to 
take account of Mr. Gladstone, must read 
much else besides Hansard ; he must brush 
up his Homer, and set himself to acquire some 
theology. The place of Greece in the provi- 
dential order of the world, and of laymen in 
the Church of England, must be considered, 
together with a host of other subjects of much 
apparent irrelevance to a statesman's life. So 
too in the case of his distinguished rival, whose 
death eclipsed the gayety of politics and ban- 
ished epigram from Parliament : keen must be 
the critical faculty which can nicely discern 
where the novelist ended and the statesman 
began in Benjamin Disraeli. 

Happil}^, no such difficulty is now before 
us. Thomas Carlyle was a writer of books, 
and he was nothing else. Beneath this judg- 
ment he would have winced, but have remained 
silent, for the facts are so. 

Little men sometimes, though not perhaps 
so often as is taken for granted, complain of 
their destiny, and think they have been hardly 
treated, in that they have been allowed to 
remain so undeniably small ; but great men, 



6 CARLYLE. 

with hardly an exception, nauseate their great- 
ness, for not being of the particular sort they 
most fancy. The poet Gray was passionately 
fond, so his biographers tell us, of military 
history; but he took no Quebec. General 
Wolfe took Quebec, and whilst he was taking 
it, recorded the fact that he would sooner 
have written Gray's " Elegy " ; and so Carlyle— 
who panted for action, who hated eloquence, 
whose heroes were Cromwell and Wellington, 
Arkwright and the " rugged Brindley," who be- 
held with pride and no ignoble envy the 
bridge at Auldgarth his mason-father had 
helped to build half a century before, and then 
exclaimed, " A noble craft, that of a mason ; a 
good building will last longer than most books 
— than one book in a million "; who despised 
men of letters, and abhorred the " reading 
public "; whose gospel was Silence and Action 
— spent his life in talking and writing ; and 
his legacy to the world is thirty-four volumes 
octavo. 

There is a familiar melancholy in this ; buc 
the critic has no need to grow sentimental. 
We must have men of thought as well as men 
of action : poets as much as generals ; authors 
no less than artizans ; libraries at least as 
much as militia ; and therefore we may accept 
and proceed critically to examine Carlyle's 
thirty-four volumes, remaining somewhat in- 
different to the fact that had he had the 
fashioning of his own destiny, we should have 
had at his hands blows instead of books. 

Taking him, then, as he was — a man of 
letters — perhaps the best type of such since 
Dr. Johnson died in Fleet street, what are we 
to say of his thirty-four volumes ? 

In them are to be found criticism, biography, 
history, politics, poetry^ and religion. I 
mention this variety because of a foolish no- 
tion, at one time often found suitably lodged 
in heads otherwise empty, that Carlyle was a 
passionate old man^ dominated by two or three 



CARL VLB. 7 

extravagant ideas, to which he was forever 
giving utterance in language of equal extrava- 
gance. The thirty-four volumes octavo render 
this opinion untenable by those who can read. 
Carlyle cannot be killed by an epigram, nor 
can the many influences that moulded him be 
referred to any single source. The rich ban- 
quet his genius has spread for us is of many 
courses. The fire and fury of the Latter-Day 
Pamphlets may be disregarded by the peace- 
ful soul, and the preference given to the " Past " 
of " Past and Present," which with its intense 
and sympathetic mediaevalism, might have been 
written by a Tractarian. The " Life of Ster- 
ling" is the favorite book of many who would 
sooner pick oakum than read " Frederick the 
Great " all through ; whilst the mere student of 
belles lettres may attach importance to the 
essays on Johnson, Burns, and Scott, on 
Voltaire and Diderot, on Goethe and Novalis, 
and yet remain blankly indifferent to " Sartor 
Resartus " and " The French Revolution." 

But true as this is, it is none the less true 
that, excepting possibly the " Life of Schiller," 
Carlyle wrote nothing not clearly recogniz- 
ble as his. All his books are his very own — 
bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh. They 
are not stolen goods, nor elegant exhibitions 
of recently and hastily acquired wares. 

This being so, it may be as well if, before 
proceeding any further, I attempt, with a 
scrupulous regard to brevity, to state what I 
take to be the invariable indications of Mr. 
Carlyle's literary handiwork — the tokens of 
his presence — " Thomas Carlyle, his mark." 

First of all, it may be stated, without a 
shadow of a doubt, that he is one of those 
who would sooner be wrong with Plato than 
right with Aristotle ; in one word, he is a mys- 
tic. What he says of Novalis may with equal 
truth be said of himself : " He belongs to 
that class of persons who do not recognize the 
syllogistic method as the chief organ for inves- 



8 CARL YLE. 

tigating truth, or feel themselves bound at all 
times to stop short where its light fails them. 
Many of his opinions he would despair of 
proving in the most patient court of law, and 
would remain well content that they should be 
disbelieved there." In philosophy we shall 
not be very far wrong if we rank Carlyle as a 
follower of Bishop Berkeley ; for an ideaHst 
he undoubtedly was. " Matter,*' says he, " ex- 
ists only spiritually, and to represent some 
idea, and body it forth. Heaven and Earth 
are but the time-vesture of the Eternal. The 
Universe is but one vast symbol of God ; nay, 
if thou wilt have it, what is man himself but a 
symbol of God ? Is not all that he does sym- 
bolical, a revelation to sense of the mystic 
God-given force that is in him ? — a gospel of 
Freedom, which he, the ' Messias of Nature,' 
preaches as he can by act and word." ^' Yes, 
Friends," he elsewhere observes, " not our log- 
ical mensurative faculty, but our imaginative 
one, is King over us, I might say Priest and 
Prophet, to lead us heavenward, or magician 
and wizard to lead us hellward. The under- 
standing is indeed thy window — too clear thou 
canst not make it ; but phantasy is thy eye, 
with its color-giving retina, healthy or dis- 
eased." It would be easy to multiply in- 
stances of this, the most obvious and interest- 
ing trait of Mr. Carlyle's writing ; but I must 
bring my remarks upon it to a close by re- 
minding you of his two favorite quotations, 
which have both significance. One from 
Shakespeare's Tempest: 

*' We are such stuff 
As dreams are made of, and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep ; " 

the other, the exclamation of the Earth-spirit, 
in Goethe's Faust : 

" 'Tis thus at the roaring loom of Time I ply, 
And weave for God the garment thou seest Him by." 



CARLYLE. 9 

But this is but one side of Carlyle. There is 
another as strongly marked, which is his sec- 
ond note ; and that is what he somewhere 
calls "his stubborn realism." The combina- 
tion of the two is as charming as it is rare. 
No one at all acquainted with his writings can 
fail to remember his almost excessive love of 
detail ; his lively taste for facts, simply as facts. 
Imaginary joys and sorrows may extort from 
him nothing but grunts and snorts ; but let him 
only worry out for himself, from that great 
dust-heap called "history," some undoubted 
fact of human and tender interest, and, how- 
ever small it may be, relating possibly to some 
one hardly known, and playing but a small 
part in the events he is recording, and he will 
wax amazingly sentimental, and perhaps shed 
as many real tears as Sterne or Dickens do 
sham ones over their figments. This realism 
of Carlyle's gives a great charm to his histo- 
ries and biographies. The amount he tells 
you is something astonishing — no platitudes, 
no rigmarole, no common-form articles which 
are the staple of most biography, but, instead 
of them, all the facts and features of the case 
— pedigree, birth, father and mother, brothers 
and sisters, education, physiognomy, personal 
habits, dress, mode of speech; nothing es- 
capes him. It was a characteristic criticism 
of his, on one of Miss Martineau's American 
books, that the story of tjie way Daniel Web- 
ster used to stand before the fire with his 
hands in his pockets was worth all the politics, 
philosophy, political economy, and sociology 
to be found in other portions of the good 
lady's writings. Carlyle's eye was indeed a 
terrible organ : he saw everything. Emerson, 
writing to him, says : " I think you see as pict- 
ures every street, church. Parliament-house, 
barracks, baker's shop, mutton-stall, forge, 
wharf, and ship, and whatever stands, creeps, 
rolls, or swims thereabout, and make all your 
own." He crosses over, one rough day, to 



%o CARLYLE. 

Dublin ; and he jots down in his diary the 
personal appearance of some unhappy creat- 
ures he never saw before or expected to see 
again ; how men laughed, cried, swore, were 
all of huge interest to Carlyle. Give him a 
fact, he loaded you with thanks ; propound a 
theory, you were rewarded with the most vivid 
abuse. 

This intense love for and faculty of per- 
ceiving, what one may call the " concrete pict- 
uresque," accounts for his many hard sayings 
about fiction and poetry. He could not un- 
derstand people being at the trouble of invent- 
ing characters and situations when history was 
full of men and women; when stre.ets were 
crowded and continents were being peopled 
under their very noses. Emerson's sphynx- 
like utterances irritated him at times, as they 
well might ; his orations and the like. " I 
long," he says, "to see some concrete things 
some Event — Man's Life, American Forest, or 
piece of Creation which this Emerson loves 
and wonders at, well Emersonized, depicted by 
Emerson — filled with the life of Emerson, and 
cast forth from him then to live by itself." * 
But Carlyle forgot the sluggishness of the or- 
dinary imagination, and, for the moment, the 
stupendous dulness of the ordinary historian. 
It cannot be matter for surprise that people 

* One need scarcely, add, nothing of the sort ever 
proceeded from Emerson. How should it? Where 
was it to come from ? When, to employ language of 
Mr. Arnold's own, " any poor child of nature " over- 
hears the author of " Essays in Criticism " telling two 
worlds that Emerson's " Essays " are the most valuable 
prose contributions to the literature of the century, his 
soul is indeed filled "^with an unutterable sense of la- 
mentation and mourning and woe." Mr. Arnold's si- 
lence was once felt to be provoking. Wordsworth's 
lines kept occurring to one's mind — 

" Poor Matthew, all his frolics o'er. 
Is silent as a standing pool." 

But it was better so. 



CARLYLE. II 

prefer Smollett's " Humphrey Clinker " to his 
" History of England. '^ 

The third and last mark to which I call at- 
tention is his humor. Nowhere, surely, in 
the whole field of English literature, Shakes- 
peare excepted, do you come upon a more 
abundant vein of humor than Carlyle's, though 
I admit that the quality of the ore is not of 
the finest. His every production is bathed in 
humor. This must never be, though it often 
has been, forgotten. He is not to be taken 
literally. He is always a humorist, not un- 
frequently a writer of burlesque, and occasion- 
ally a buffoon. 

Although the spectacle of Mr. Swinburne 
taking Mr. Carlyle to task, as he recently did, 
for indelicacy, has an oddity all its own, so far 
as I am concerned I cannot but concur with 
this critic in thinking that Carlyle has laid 
himself open, particularly in his " Frederick 
the Great," to the charge one usually associates 
with the great and terrible name of Dean 
Swift ; but it is the Dean with a difference, 
and the difference is all in Carlyle's favor. 
The former deliberately pelts you with dirt, as 
did in old days gentlemen electors their par- 
liamentary .candidates : the latter only occa- 
sionally splashes you, as does a public vehicle 
pursuing on a wet day its uproarious course. 

These, then, I take to be Carlyle's three 
principal marks or notes : mysticism in 
thought, realism in description, and humor in 
both. 

To proceed now to his actual literary work. 

First, then, I would record the fact that he 
was a great critic, and this at a time when our 
literary criticism was a scandal. He more 
than any other has purged our vision and 
widened our horizons in this great matter. 
He taught us there was no sort of finality, but 
only nonsense, jq that kind of criticism which 
was content with laying down some foreign 
masterpiece with the observation that it was 



12 CARL YLE. 

not suited for the English taste. He was, if 
not the first, almost the first critic, who pur- 
sued in his criticism the historical method, and 
sought to make us understand what we were 
required to judge. It has been said that Car- 
lyle's criticisms are not final, and that he has 
not said the last word about Voltaire, Diderot, 
Richter, and Goethe. I can well believe it. 
But reserving " last words " for the use of the 
last man (to whom they would appear to be- 
long), it is surely something to have said the 
first sensible words uttered in English on these 
important subjects. We ought not to forget 
the early days of the Fo7'eig?i a?id Quarterly 
Review. We have critics' now, quieter, more 
reposeful souls, taking their ease on Zion, who 
have entered upon a world ready to welcome 
them, whose keen rapiers may cut velvet better 
than did the two-handed broadsword of Car- 
}y}e, and whose later date may enable them to 
discern what their forerunner failed to per- 
ceive ; but when the critics of this century- 
come to be criticised by the critics of the 
next, an honorable, if not the highest place 
will be awarded to Carlyle. 

Turn we now to the historian and biogra- 
pher. History and biography much resemble 
one another in the pages of Carlyle, and oc- 
cupy more than half his thirty-four volumes ; 
nor is this to be wondered at, since they af- 
ford him fullest scope for his three strong 
points — his love of the wonderful ; his love of 
telling a story, as the children say, " from the 
very beginning ; " and his humor. His view 
of history is sufficiently lofty. History, says 
he, is the true epic poem, a universal divine 
scripture whose plenary inspiration no one 
out of Bedlam shall bring into question. Nor 
is he quite at one with the ordinary historian 
as to the true historical method. " The time 
seems coming when he who sees no world but 
that of courts and camps, arid writes only how 
soldiers were drilled- and shot, and how this 



CARLYLE. 13 

ministerial conjurer out-conjured that other, 
and then guided, or at least held, something 
which he called the rudder uf Government, 
but which was rather the spigot of Taxation, 
wherewith in place of steering he could tax, 
will pass for a more or less instructive Gazet- 
teer, but will no longer be called an Histo- 
rian." 

Nor does the philosophical method of writ- 
ing history please him any better : 

"Truly if History is Philosophy teaching by 
examples, the writer fitted to compose history 
is hitherto an unknown man. Better were it 
that mere earthly histoiians should lower such 
pretensions, more suitable for omniscience 
than for human science, and aiming only at 
some picture of the things acted, which pict- 
ure itself will be a poor approximation, leave 
the inscrutable purport of them an acknowl- 
edged secret — or at most, in reverent faith, 
pause over the mysterious vestiges of Him 
whose path is in the great deep of Time, 
whom History indeed reveals, but only all 
History and in Eternity will clearly reveal." 

This same transcendental way of looking 
at things is very noticeable in the following 
view of Biography : " For, as the highest gos- 
pel was a Biography, so is the life of every 
good man still an indubitable gospel, and 
preaches to the eye and heart and whole man, 
so that devils even must believe and tremble, 
these gladdest tidings. Man is heaven-born 
— not the thrall of circumstances, of necessity, 
but the victorious subduer thereof." These, 
then, being his views, what are we to say of 
his works ? His three principal historical 
works are, as everyone knows, "Cromwell," 
" The French Revolution," and " Frederick the 
Great," though there is a very considerable 
amount of other historical writing scattered 
up and down his works. But what are we to 
say of these three ? Is he, ])y virtue of them, 
entitled to the rank and influence of a great 



14 CARL YLE. 

historian ? What have we a right to demand 
of an historian ? First, surely stern veracity, 
which implies not merely knowledge but hon- 
esty. An historian stands in a fiduciary posi- 
tion towards his readers, and if he withholds 
from them important facts likely to influence 
their judgment, he is guilty of fraud, and, 
when justice is done in this world, will be con- 
demned to refund all moneys he has made by 
his false professions, with compound interest. 
This sort of fraud is unknown to the law, but 
to nobody else. "Let me know the facts!" 
may well be the agonized cry of the student 
who finds himself floating down what Arnold 
has called " the vast Mississippi of falsehood, 
History." Secondly comes a catholic temper 
and way of looking at things. The historian 
should be a gentleman and possess a moral 
breadth of temperament. There should be 
no bitter protesting spirit about him. He 
should remember the world he has taken upon 
himself to write about is a large place, and 
that nobody set him up over us. Thirdly, he 
must be a born story-teller. If he is not this, 
he has mistaken his vocation. He may be a 
great philosopher, a useful editor, a profound 
scholar, and anything else his friends like to 
call him, except a great historian. How does 
Carlyle meet these requirements ? His verac- 
ity, that is, his laborious accuracy, is admitted 
by the only persons competent to form an opin- 
ion, namely, independent investigators who 
have followed in his track ; but what may be 
called the internal evidence of the case also 
supplies a strong proof of it. Carlyle was, as 
every one knows, a hero-worshipper. It is part 
of his mysticism. With him man, as well as 
God, is a spi-rit, either of good or evil, and as 
such should be either worshipped or reviled. 
He is never himself till he has discovered or 
invented a hero; and, when his has got him, he 
tosses and dandles him as a mother her babe. 
This is a terrible temptation to put in the way 



CARL YLE. 15 

of an historian, and few there be who are found 
able to resist it. How easy to keep back an 
ugly fact, sure to be a stumbling-block in the 
way of weak brethren ! Carlyle is above sus- 
picion in this respect. He knows no reticence. 
Nothing restrains him ; not even the so-called 
proprieties of history. He may, after his 
boisterous fashion, pour scorn upon you for 
looking grave, as you read in his vivid pages 
of the reckless manner in which too many of 
his heroes drove coaches-and-six through the 
Ten Commandments. As likely as not he 
will call you a blockhead, and tell you to close 
your wide mouth and cease shrieking. But, 
dear me ! hard words break no bones, and it 
is an amazing comfort to know the facts. Is 
he writing of Cromwell ? — down goes every- 
thing — letters, speeches, as they were written, 
as they were delivered. Few great men are 
edited after this fashion. Were they to be so 
— Luther, for example — many eyes would be 
opened very wide. Nor does Carlyle fail in. 
comment. If the Protector makes a some- 
what Distant allusion to the Barbadoes, Car- 
lyle is at your elbow to tell you it means his 
selling people to work as slaves in the West 
Indies. As for Mirabeau, " our wild Gabriel 
Honore," well ! we are told all about him ; 
nor is Frederick let off a single absurdity or 
atrocity. But when we have admitted the 
veracity, what are we to say of the catholic 
temper, the breadth of temperament, the wide 
Shakespearian tolerance ? Carlyle ought to 
have them all. By nature he was tolerant 
enough ; so true a humorist could never be a 
bigot. When his war-paint is not on, a child 
might lead him. His judgments are gracious, 
chivalrous, tinged with a kindly melancholy 
and divine pity. But this mood is never for 
long. Some gadfly stings him : he seizes his 
tomahawk and is off on the trail. It must 
sorrowfully be admitted that a long life of op- 
position and indigestion, of fierce warfare with 



i6 CARL YLE. 

cooks and Philistines, spoilt his temper, never 
of the best, and made him too often contempt- 
uous, savage, unjust. His language then be- 
comes unreasonable, unbearable, bad. Litera- 
ture takes care of herself. You disobey her 
rules: well and good, she shuts her door in 
your face ; you plead your genius : she replies, 
" Your temper," and bolts it. Carlyle has de- 
liberately destroyed, by his own wilfulness, 
the value of a great deal he has written. It 
can never become classical. Alas ! that this 
should be true of too many eminent English- 
men of our time. Language such as was, at 
one time, almost habitual with Mr. Ruskin, is 
a national humiliation, giving point to the 
Frenchman's sneer as to our distinguishing 
literary characteristic being ^^ la brutalite." 
In Carlyle's case much must be allowed for 
his rhetoric and humor. In slang phrase, he 
always " piles it on." Does a bookseller mis- 
direct a parcel, he exclaims, " My malison on. 
all Blockheadisms and Torpid Infidelities of 
which this world is full." Still, all allowances 
made, it is a thousand pities; and one's 
thoughts turn away from this stormy old man 
and take refuge in the quiet haven of the 
Oratory at Birmingham, with his great Protag- 
onist, who, throughout an equally long life 
spent in painful controversy, and wielding 
weapons as terrible as Carlyle's own, has rare- 
ly forgotten to be urbane, and whose every 
sentence is a "thing of iDeauty." It must, 
then, be owned that too many of Carlyle's lit- 
erary achievements " lack a gracious some- 
what." By force of his genius he "smites the 
rock and spreads the water ; " but then, like 
Moses, " he desecrates, belike, the deed in 
doing." 

Our third requirement was, it may be re- 
membered, the gift of the story-teller. Here 
one is on firm ground. Where is the equal 
of the man who has told us the story of " The 
Diamond Necklace ? " 



\ 



CARLYLE. 17 

It is the vogue, nowadays, to sneer at pict- 
uresque writing. Professor Seeley, for rea- 
sons of his own, appears to think that whilst 
politics, and, I presume religion, may be made 
as interesting as you please, history should be 
as dull as possible. This, surely, is a jaun- 
diced view. If there is one thing it is legiti- 
mate to make more interesting than another, 
it is the varied record of man's life upon 
earth. So long as we have human hearts 
and await human destinies, so long as we are 
alive to the pathos, the dignity, the comedy of 
human life, so long shall we continue to rank 
above the philosopher, higher than the politi- 
cian, the great artist, be he called dramatist 
or historian, who makes us conscious of the 
divine movement of events, and of our fathers 
who were before us. Of course we assume 
accuracy and labor in our animated historian ; 
thcugh for that matter, other things being 
equal, I prefer a lively liar to a dull one. 

Carlyle is sometimes as irresistible as " The 
Campbells are Coming," or " Auld Lang Syne." 
He has described some men and some events 
once and for all, and so takes his place with 
Thucydides, Tacitus and Gibbon. Pedants 
may try hard to forget this, and may in their 
labored nothings seek to ignore the author of 
" Cromwell " and " The French Revolution " ; 
but as well might the pedestrian in Cumber- 
land or Inverness seek to ignore Helvellyn or 
Ben Nevis. Carlyle is there, and will remain 
there, when the pedant of to-day has been 
superseded by the pedant of to-morrow. ' 

Remembering all this, we are apt to for- 
get his faults, his eccentricities, and vagaries, 
his buffooneries, his too-outrageous cynicisms 
and his too-intrusive egotisms, and to ask our- 
selves — if it be not this man, who is it then to 
be 1 Macaulay, answer some ; and Macaulay's 
claims are not of the sort to go unrecognized 
in a world which loves clearness of expression 
and of view only too well. Macaulay's posi- 

2 



i8 CARLYLE. 

tion never admitted of doubt. We know 
what to expect, and we always get it. It is 
like the old days of W. G. Grace's cricket. 
We went to see the leviathan slog for six, and 
we saw it. We expected him to do it, and he 
did it. So with Macaulay — the good Whig, 
as he takes up the History, settles himself 
down in his chair, and knows it is going to be 
a bad time for the Tories. Macaulay's style 
— his much-praised style — is ineffectual for the 
purpose of telling the Jtruth about anything. 
It is splendid, but splendide mendax^ and in 
Macaulay's case the style was the man. He 
had enormous knowledge, and a noble spirit ; 
his knowledge, enriched his style and his 
spirit consecrated it to the service of Liberty. 
We do well to be proud of Macaulay ; but we 
must add that, great as was his knowledge, 

-^ great also was his ignorance, which was nojie 
the less ignorance because it was wilful; 
noble as was his spirit, the range of subject 

-- over which it energized was painfully re- 
stricted. He looked out upon the world, but 
behold, only the Whigs were good. Luther 
and Loyola, Cromwell and Claverhouse, 
Carlyle and Newman — they moved him not ; 
their enthusiasms were delusions, and their pol- 
itics demonstrable errors. Whereas, of Lord 
Somers and Charles first Earl Grey it is impos- 
sible to speak without emotion. But the world 
does not belong to the Whigs ; and a great 
historian must be capable of sympathizing 
both with delusions and demonstrable errors. 
Mr. Gladstone has commented with force upon 
what he calls Macaulay's invincible ignorance, 
and further says that to certain aspects of a 
case (particularly those aspects most pleasing 
to Mr. Gladstone) Macaulay's mind was her- 
metically sealed. It is difficult to resist these 
conclusions ; and it would appear no rash in- 
ference from them, that a man in a state of 
invincible ignorance and with a mind hermet- 
ically sealed, whatever else he maybe — orator, 



CARLYLE. 19 

advocate, statesman, journalist, man of letters 
— can never be a great historian. But, indeed, 
when one remembers Macaulay's Hmited 
range of ideas : the commonplaceness of his 
morality, and of his descriptions ; his absence 
of humor, and of pathos — for though Miss 
Martineau says she found one pathetic pas- 
sage in the History, I have often searched for 
it in vain ; and then turns to Carlyle — to his 
almost bewildering affluence of thought, fancy, 
feeling, humor, pathos — his biting pen, his 
scorching criticism, his world-wide sym.pathy 
(save in certain moods) with everything but 
the smug commonplace — to prefer Macaulay 
to him, is like giving the preference to Birket 
Foster over Salvator Rosa. But if it is not 
Macaulay, who is it to be ? Mr. Hepworth 
lijxon or I^r. Froude ? Of Bishop Stubbs 
and Professor Freeman it behoves every ignor- 
amus to speak with respect. Horny-handed 
sons of toil, they are worthy of their wage, 
Carlyle has somewhere struck a distinction 
between the historical artist and the historical 
artizan. The bishop and the professor are 
historical artizans ; artists they are not — and 
the great historian is a great artist. 

England boasts two such artists, Edward 
Gibbon and Thomas Carlyle. The elder his- 
torian may be compared to one of the great 
Alpine roadways — sublime in its conception, 
heroic in its- execution, superb in its magnif- 
icent uniformity of good workmanship. The 
younger resembles one of his native streams, 
pent in at times between huge rocks, and tor- 
mented into foam, and then effecting its es- 
cape down some precipice, and spreading into 
cool expanses below ; but however varied may 
be its fortunes — however startling its changes 
— always in motion, always in harmony with 
the scene around. Is it gloomy ? It is with 
the gloom of the thunder-cloud. Is it bright ? 
It is with the radiance of the sun. 

It is with some consternation that I ap- 



20 CARLYLE. 

proach the subject of Carlyle's politics. One 
handles them as does an inspector of police 
a parcel reported to contain dynamite. The 
Latter-Day Pamphlets might not unfitly be 
labelled " Dangerous Explosives." 

In this matter of politics there were two 
Carlyles ; and, as generally happens in such 
cases, his last state was worse than his first. 
Up to 1843, he not unfairly might be called a 
Liberal — of uncertain vote it may be — a man 
difficult to work with, and impatient of disci- 
pline, but still aglow with generous heat ; full 
of large-hearted sympathy with the poor and 
oppressed, and of intense hatred of the cruel 
and shallow sophistries that then passed for 
maxims, almost for axioms, of government. 
In the year 18 19, when the yeomanry round 
Glasgow was called out to keep down some 
dreadful monsters called " Radicals," Carlf le 
describes how he met an advocate of his ac- 
quaintance hurrying along, musket in hand, 
to his drill on the Links. " You should have 
the like of this," said he, cheerily patting his 
gun. "Yes," was the reply, "but I haven't 
yet quite settled on which side." And when 
he did make his choice, on the whole he chose 
rightly. The author of that noble pamphlet 
" Chartism," published in 1840, was at least 
once a Liberal. Let me quote a passage that 
has stirred to effort many a generous heart 
now cold in death : " Who wpuld suppose 
*' that Education were a thing which had to 
** be advocated on the ground of local expe- 
*' diency, or indeed on any ground t As if it 
*' stood not on the basis of an everlasting 
" duty, as a prime necessity of man ! It is 
"a thing that should need no advocating; 
*'muchasit does actually need. To impart 
" the gift of thinking to those who cannot 
" think, and yet who could in that case think : 
*' this, one would imagine, was the first function 
*'a government had to set about discharging. 
*' Were it not a cruel thing to see, in any prov- 



CARLYLE. 21 

** ince of an empire, the inhabitants living all 
*' mutilated in their limbs, each strong man 
*Svith his right arm lamed? How much 
*' crueller to find the strong soul with its eyes 
" still sealed— its eyes extinct, so that it sees 
*' not ! Li^\t has come into the world ; but 
"to this poor peasant it has come in vain. 
" For six thousand years the sons of Adam, in 
** sleepless effort, have been devising, doing, 
" discovering ; in mysterious infinite, indis- 
'' soluble communion, warring, a little band of 
"brothers, against the black empire of ne- 
" cessity and night ; they have accomplished 
" such a conquest and conquests ; and to this 
"man it is all as if it had not been. The 
" four-and-twenty letters of the alphabet are 
" still runic enigmas to him. He passes by on 
" the other side ; and that great spiritual king- 
" dom, the toil-won conquest of his own broth- 
"ers, all that his brothers have conquered, 
"is a thing not extant for him. An invisible 
"empire; he knows it not— suspects it not. 
" And is not this his withal ; the conquest of 
"his own brothers, the lawfully acquired pos- 
"session of all meiF? Baleful enchantment 
" lies over him, from generation to generation ; 
" he knows not that such an empire is his — 
"that such an empire is his at all. . . . 
" Heavier wrong is not done under the sun. 
" It lasts from year to year, from century to 
"century; the blinded sire slaves himself 
" out, and leaves a blinded son ; and men, 
" made in the image of God, continue as two- 
-legged beasts of labor; and in the largest 
" empire of the world it is a debate whether a 
" small fraction of the revenue of one day 
"shall, after thirteen centuries, be laid out on 
" it or not laid out on it. Have we governors ? 
" Have we teachers ? Have we had a Church 
" these thirteen hundred years ? What is an 
"overseer of souls, an archoverseer, archie- 
" piscopus ? Is he something ? If so, let him 



22 CARLYLE, 

*' lay his hand on his heart and say what 
" thing ! " 

Nor was the man who in 1843 wrote .is fol- 
lows altogether at sea in politics : 

'' Of Time Bill, Factory Bill, and other such 
" Bills, the present editor has no authority to 
" speak. He knows not, it is for others than 
*' he to know, in what specific ways it may be 
*' feasible to interfere with legislation between 
" the workers and the master-workers — knows 
" only and sees that legislative interference, 
*' and interferences not a few, are indispensa- 
" ble. Nay, interference has begun ; there 
" are already factory inspectors. Perhaps 
" there might be mine inspectors too. Might 
" there not be furrow-field inspectors withal, 
" to ascertain how, on "js. 6d. a week, a human 
" family does live 1 Again, are not sanitary 
*' regulations possible for a legislature ? Baths, 
"free air, a wholesome temperature, ceihngs 
" twenty feet high, might be ordained by Act 
'^ of Parliament in all establishments licensed 
'' as mills. There are such mills already ex- 
*' tant — honor to the builders of them. The 
" legislature can say to others, ' Go you 
*' ' and do likewise — better if you can.' " 

By no means a bad programme for 1843 5 
and a good part of it has been carried out, but 
with next to no aid from Carlyle. 

The Radical party has struggled on as best 
it might, without the author of '' Chartism " and 
" The French Revolution "— 

" They have marched prospering, not through his pres- 
ence ; 
Songs have inspired them, not from his lyre;." 

and it is no party spirit that leads one to re- 
gret the change of mind which prevented the 
later public life of this great man, and now the 
memory of it, from being enriched with some- 
thing better than a five-pound note for Gov- 
ernor Eyre. 

But it could not be helped. What brought 



CARL YLE. 23 

about the rupture was his losing faith in the 
ultimate destiny of man upon earth. No more 
terrible loss can be sustained. It is of both 
heart and hope. He fell back upon heated 
visions of heaven-sent heroes, devoting their 
early days for the most part to hoodwinking 
the people, and their latter ones, more heroic- 
ally, to shooting them. 

But it is foolish to quarrel with results, and 
we may learn something even from the later 
Carlyle. We lay down John Bright's Reform 
Speeches, and take up Carlyle and light upon 
a passage like this : " Inexpressibly delirious 
seems to me the puddle of Parliament and 
public upon what it calls Reform Measure, 
that is to say, the calling in of new supplies of 
blockheadism, gullibility, bribability, amena- 
bility to beer and balderdash, by way of 
amending the woes we have had from previous 
supplies of that bad article." This view must 
be accounted for as well as Mr. Bright's. We 
shall do well to remember, with Carlyle, that 
the best of all Reform Bills is that which each 
citizen passes in his own breast, where it is 
pretty sure to meet with strenuous opposition. 
The reform of ourselves is no doubt an heroic 
measure never to be overlooked, and, in the 
face of accusations of gullibility, bribability, 
amenability to beer and balderdash, our poor 
humanity can only stand abashed, and feebly 
demur to the bad English in which the charges 
are conve37ed. But we can't all lose hope. 
We remember Sir David Ramsay's reply to 
Lord Rea, once quoted by Carlyle himself. 
Then said his lordship : " Well, God mend all." 
" Nay, by God, Donald, we must help Him to 
mend it ! " It is idle to stand gaping at the 
heavens, waiting to feel the thong of some 
hero of questionable morals and robust con- 
science ; and therefore, unless Reform Bills 
can be shown to have checked purity of elec- 
tion, to have increased the stupidity of elect- 
orsy and generally to have promoted corrup- 



24 CARL YLE. 

tion — which notoriously they have not — we 
may allow Carlyle to make his exit " swearing," 
and regard their presence in the Statute Book, 
if not with rapture, at least, with equanimity. 

But it must not be forgotten that the battle 
is still raging — the issue is still uncertain. Mr. 
Froude is still free to assert that the '''■ post-mor- 
tem " will prove Carlyle was right. His polit- 
ical sagacity no reader of " Frederick " can 
deny ; his insight into hidden causes and far- 
away effects was keen beyond precedent — 
nothing he ever said deserves contempt, though 
it may merit anger. If we would escape his 
conclusion, we must not altogether disregard 
his premises. Bankruptcy and death are the 
final heirs of imposture and make-believes. 
The old faiths and forms are worn too thread- 
bare by a thousand disputations to bear the 
burden of the new democracy, which, if it is 
not merely to win the battle but to hold the 
country, must be ready with new faiths and 
forms of her own. They are within her reach 
if she but knew it ; they lie to her hand : surely 
they will not escape her grasp! If they do 
not, then, in the glad day when worship is 
once more restored to man, he will with be- 
coming generosity forget much that Carlyle 
has written, and remembering more, rank him 
amongst the prophets of humanity. 

Carlyle's poetry can only be exhibited in 
long extracts, which would be here out of 
place, and might excite controversy as to the 
meaning of words, and draw down upon me 
the measureless malice of the metricists. 
There are, however, passages in " Sartor Re- 
sartus " and the " French Revolution " which 
have long appeared to me to be the sublimest 
poetry of the century; and it was therefore 
with great pleasure that I found Mr. Justice 
Stephen, in his book on " Liberty, Equality, 
and Fraternity," introducing a quotation from 
the 8th chapter of the 3rd book of " Sartor Re- 
sartus," w^\ the remark that " it is perhaps the 



CARLYLE. 25 

most memorable utterance of the greatest poet 
of the age." 

As for Carlyle's religion, it may be said he 
had none, inasmuch as he expounded no creed 
and put his name to no confession. This is 
the pendantry of the schools. He taught us 
religion, as cold water and fresh air teach us 
health, by rendering the conditions of disease 
well nigh impossible. For more than half a 
century, with superhuman energy, he struggled 
to establish the basis of all religions, "rever- 
ence and godly fear." " Love not pleasure, \ 
love God ; this is the everlasting Yea." 

One's remarks might here naturally come to 
an end, with a word or two of hearty praise of 
the brave course of life led by the man who 
awhile back stood the acknowledged head of 
English letters. But the present time is not . 
the happiest for a panegyric on Carlyle, It 
would be in vain to deny that the brightness 
of his reputation underwent an eclipse, visible 
everywhere, by the publication of his " Remi- 
niscences." They surprised most of us, pained . 
not a few, and hugely delighted that ghastly 
crew, the wreckers of humanity, who are never 
so happy as when employed in pulling down 
great reputations to their own miserable levels. 
When these " baleful creatures," as Carlyle 
would have called them, have lit upon any 
passage indicative of conceit or jealousy or 
spite, they have fastened upon it and screamed 
over it, with a pleasure but ill-concealed and 
with a horror but ill-feigned. " Behold," they 
exclaim, " your hero robbed of the nimbus his 
inflated style cast around him — this preacher 
and fault-finder reduced to his principal parts : 
and lo ! the main ingredient is most unmistaka- 
bly 'bile!'" 

The critic, however, has nought to do either 
with the sighs of the sorrowful, "mourning 
when a hero falls," or with the scorn of the 
malicious, rejoicing, as did Bunyan's Juryman, 
Mr, Live-loose, when Faithful was condemned 



26 CARLYLE. 

to die : " I could never endure him, for he 
would always be condemning my way." 

The critic's task is to consider the book it- 
self, i.e., the nature of its contents, and how 
it came to be written at all. 

Wh,en this has been done, there will not be 
found much demanding moral censure ; 
whilst the reader will note with delight, ap- 
plied to the trifling concerns of life, those ex- 
traordinary gifts of observation and apprehen- 
sion which have so often charmed him in the 
pages of history and biography. 

These peccant volumes contain but four 
sketches: one of his father, written in 1832; 
the other three, of Edward Irving, Lord Jeffrey, 
and Mrs. Carlyle, all written after the death 
of the last-named, in 1866. 

The only fault that has been found with the 
first sketch is, that in it Carlyle hazards the 
assertion that Scotland does not now contain 
his father's like. It ought surely to be possi- 
ble to dispute this opinion without exhibiting 
emotion. To think well of their forbears is 
one of the few weaknesses of Scotchmen. 
This sketch, as a whole, must be carried to 
Carlyle's credit, and is a permanent addition 
to literature. It is pious, after the high Ro- 
man fashion. It satisfies our finest sense of 
the fit and proper. Just exactly so should a ' 
literate son write of an illiterate peasant 
father. How immeasurable seems the dis- 
tance between the man from whom proceeded 
the thirty-four volumes we have been writing 
about and the Calvinistic mason who didn't 
even know his Burns ! — and yet here we find 
the whole distance spanned by filial love. 

The sketch of Lord Jeffrey is inimitable. 
One was getting tired of Jeffrey, and prepared 
to give him the go-by, when Carlyle creates 
him afresh, and, for the first time, we see the 
bright little man bewitching us by what he is, 
disappointing us by what he is not. The 
spiteful remarks the sketch contains may be 



CARLYLE. r, 

considered, along with those of the same na- 
ture to be found only too plentifully in the 
remaining two papers. 

After careful consideration of the worst of 
these remarks, Mrs. Oliphant's explanation 
seems the true one ; they are most of them 
sparkling bits of Mrs. Catlyle's conversation. 
She, happily for herself, had a lively wit, and, 
perhaps not so happily, a biting tongue, and 
was, as Carlyle tells us, accustomed to make 
him laugh, as they drove home together from 
London crushes, by far from genial observa- 
tions on her fellow-creatures, little recking — 
how should she ? — that what was so lightly 
uttered was being engraven on the tablets of 
the most marvellous of memories, and was 
destined long afterwards to be written down 
in grim earnest by a half-frenzied old man, 
and printed, in cold blood, by an English gen- 
tleman. 

The horrible description of Mrs. Irving's 
personal appearance, and the other stories of 
the same connection, are recognized by Mrs. 
Oliphant as in substance Mrs. Carlyle's ; whilst 
the malicious account of Mrs. Basil Monta- 
gue's head-dress is attributed by Carlyle him- 
self to his wife. Still, after dividing the total, 
there is a good helping for each, and blame 
would justly be Carlyle's due if we did not re- 
member, as we are bound to do, that, interest- 
ing as these three sketches are, their interest 
is pathological, and ought never to have been 
given us. Mr. Froude should have read them 
in tears, and burnt them in fire. There is 
nothing surprising in the state of mind which 
produced them. They are easily accounted for 
by our sorrow-laden experience. It is a fa- 
miliar feeling which prompts a man, suddenly 
bereft of one whom he alone really knew and 
loved, to turn in his fierce indignation upon 
the world, and deride its idols whom all are 
praising, and which yet to him seem ugly by 
the side of one of whom no one speaks. To 



28 CARLYLE. 

be angry with such a sentence as " scribbling 
Sands and Eliots, not fit to compare with my 
incomparable Jeannie,'" is at once inhuman 
and ridiculous. This is the language of the 
heart, not of the head. It is no more criti- 
cism than is the trunjoeting of a wounded ele- 
phant zoology. 

Happy is the man who at such a time holds 
both peace and pen ; but unhappiest of all 
is he who, having dipped his sorrow into ink, 
entrusts the manuscript to a romantic historian. 

The two volumes of the ^'Life," and the 
three volumes of Mrs. Carlyle's " Correspond- 
ence," unfortunately did not pour oil upon the 
troubled waters. The partizanship they 
evoked was positively indecent. Mrs. Car- 
lyle had her troubles and her sorrows, as have 
most women who live under the same roof 
with a man of creative genius ; but of one thing 
we may be quite sure, that she would have been 
the first, to use her own expressive language, to 
require God " particularly to damn " her im- 
pertinent sympathizers. As for Mr. Froude, 
he may yet discover his Nemesis in the spirit 
of an angry woman whose privacy he has 
invaded, and whose diary he has most wan- 
tonly published. 

These dark clouds are ephemeral. They 
^1^11 roll away, and we shall once more gladly 
recognize the lineaments of an essentially 
lofty character, of one who, though a man of 
genius and of letters, neither outraged society 
nor stooped to it ; was neither a rebel nor a 
slave ; who in poverty scorned wealth ; who 
nover mistook popularity for fame ; but from 
the first assumed, and throughout maintained, 
the proud attitude of one whose duty it was 
to teach and not to tickle mankind. 

Brother-dunces, lend me your ears ! not to 
crop, but that I may whisper into their furry 
depths : *' Do not quarrel with genius. We 
have none ourselves, and yet are so constitu- 
ted that we cannot live without it." 



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